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Political Economy Part 1 Aspects of the English Corporation ∵ William A. Pettigrew - 9789004387850 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 11:04:32AM via free access William A. Pettigrew - 9789004387850 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 11:04:32AM via free access Chapter 1 Political Economy William A. Pettigrew Early modern global interactions were mostly commercial in ambition. These interactions, however, were often inhibited and undermined by cultures (around the world) that remained ambivalent about commercial agendas and activities. Europeans and non-Europeans sized one another up in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with profound mutual suspicion expressed in re- markably similar language: both saw each other as brutal, greedy, perfidious infidels.1 Both sides believed the other to be predisposed to commercial trick- ery. For most Europeans, the trading corporation proved the main institutional vehicle for these encounters. The corporation was meant to provide manda- tory government to ensure that cross- culture commerce favoured the inter- ests of Europeans and negated the interests of untrustworthy foreigners. But corporations themselves could not fully shed their associations with intrinsic commercial perfidy. The English East India Company, for example, learnt that it could not send a merchant to serve as its representative at the Mughal Court. Company factors had advised that ‘the title of a merchant is of them despised’.2 While the end for such diplomacy was explicitly commercial, the means would have to pretend otherwise. This inherent contradiction between a trading corporation’s nationalist, governmental responsibilities and the private, profit maximizing interests of 1 Thomas Mun, Discourse of Trade (London, 1621), 8. For Non- European views of Europeans see Anthony Read, ‘Early Southeast Asian Categorizations of Europeans’ in Stuart Schwartz (ed.), Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Eu- ropeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 268– 294, see esp. 287; see also Guido Van Meersbergen ‘Dutch and English Approaches to Cross- Cultural Trade in Mughal India and the Problem of Trust’ in Catia Antunes and Ame- lia Polonia (eds.), Beyond Empires: Global, Self- Organizing, Cross- Imperial Networks, 1500–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 69– 87; and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Taking Stock of the Franks: South Asian Views of Europeans and Europe, 1500–1800’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 42, 1, (2005): 69– 101. 2 Letters Received by the East India Company from its servants in the East [hereafter Letters Re- ceived] 6 vols. (London, 1896 – 1902), ed. F C Danvers and W Foster, Vol. 2: William Edwards to Sir Thomas Smith, 26 December 1614, 243– 44. See also Rupali Mishra, ‘Diplomacy at the Edge: Split Interests in the Roe Embassy to the Mughal Court’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 53, 1, (2014): 5– 28. © William A. Pettigrew, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004387850_003 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC-ND license at the time of publication. William A. Pettigrew - 9789004387850 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 11:04:32AM via free access 44 Pettigrew the merchants who largely financed and managed such companies became a foundational concern for political economists in the later eighteenth cen- tury. For Adam Smith the paradox implied ‘a strange absurdity’ in corporate political economy. For Smith, this schizophrenia of ‘sovereign’ and ‘mercan- tile’ priorities was inherent to corporate political economy: ‘As sovereigns, their interest [the East India Company’s] is exactly the same with that of the country which they govern. As merchants, their interest is directly opposite to that interest’.3 These contradictions imply – from a twenty- first century per- spective – a strange role for political economy in the careers of the English trading corporations of the late sixteenth to Smith’s day.4 Of course, the early modern mind did not always draw hard distinctions between what the modern world can distinguish as separate economic and political realms. But none- theless – the emerging and increasingly contentious and public debate about political economy – or the theory of the proper role of commercial matters within domestic and international politics – became more avowedly economic across this period. Recent and important depictions of trading corporations as governing and constitutional structures ought not to inhibit us from not- ing the influence that trading corporations had over this process of separating economic and political phenomena.5 The end result of this separation allowed for the emergence of classical economic theory and – in the context of the global interactions this volume focusses on – the belief (among Europeans at least) that ‘sweet’ commerce would facilitate mutually beneficial commercial relationships around the world (to substitute for the profound mutual suspi- cion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries).6 Across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the terms of English thought and practice about political economy broadened from ‘civic humanist’ to the elastic, versatile languages of 3 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London, 1776), vol. 2, chapter 7, book 3 www.econlib.org/ library/ Smith/ smWN17.html#B.IV, Ch.7, Of Colo- nies [accessed October 3 October 2017]. 4 According to Julian Hoppit, the term political economy was first used in France in 1615 and was used infrequently prior to the 1760s. See Julian Hoppit, Britain’s Political Economies: Par- liament and Economic Life, 1660– 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 3. 5 On these attempts see Philip J Stern The Company- State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Ear- ly Modern Origins of the British Empire In India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and William A Pettigrew, ‘Corporate Constitutionalism and the Dialogue between the Global and Local in Seventeenth Century English History’, Itinerario, vol. 39, 3, (2015): 487 – 501. 6 On doux of sweet commerce see Albert O Hirschman, The Passions and the Intersts: Polit- ical Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997: New Edition), 56– 62. William A. Pettigrew - 9789004387850 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 11:04:32AM via free access Political Economy 45 commercial and liberal thought.7 This chapter will argue that the distinctive global sociology of trading corporations played a central role in this volte face in global political economy. Trading corporations provoked, nurtured, and focussed debates about po- litical economy. As structures that gave separate legal personality to dynamic networks of individuals, the corporation helped to absorb and shape think- ing and writing about political economy and give that writing a public role and audience. To be sure, not all paradigm shifts in political economy derived from corporate settings. The writings of Sir William Petty – a pioneer in this field – appear to owe very little to corporate issues.8 Nonetheless leading mem- bers of trading corporations – like Thomas Mun and Josiah Child and Malachy Postlethwayt became celebrated and influential political economists while established writers like Charles Davenant and Daniel Defoe supported trad- ing corporations. The companies financed large- scale state lobbying machines and pamphleteering operations to nurture these views and deploy them in defence of their privileges. As powerful and often- wealthy, privileged entities whose existence upheld controversial positions within prevailing debates about political economy, the trading corporations were central characters in these debates and their development. This chapter examines the distinctive global sociology of the trading corpo- ration through the lens of political economy. It notes how the corporate argu- ments in favour of monopoly, to take the most prominent example, remained profoundly static across the period 1550– 1750. This chapter focusses, howev- er, on certain moments of conceptual innovation that trading corporations spurred and shaped. It places the relationship between corporate activity and developing political economy into a global framework of cross- cultural inter- actions. These global corporate debates about political economy channelled the experiences of international contexts into domestic public debates and back again. In this way, corporations help us to demonstrate the global con- texts in which mercantilist doctrine emerged and altered and show us how non- Europeans peoples’ interactions with European corporations prompted and structured transnational debates about political economy. Scholars have most often associated corporate political economy with that most colligatory of early modern historians’ devices – mercantilism. Corporations 7 For an earlier statement of this view see J G A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Floren- tine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1975), Ch xiii. 8 Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2009). William A. Pettigrew - 9789004387850 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 11:04:32AM via free access 46 Pettigrew articulated and upheld pillars of mercantilist doctrine as part of their special pleading in defence of their corporate privileges – especially monopoly. This in- tellectual and – for the most part
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